Buried Cities, vol 1, Pompeii | Page 9

bubbles. At another time the steam is not so strong and only
pushes the stuff out gently over the crater's edge. Many different
minerals are found in these rocks--iron, copper, lead, mica, zinc,
sulphur. Some pieces are beautiful in color--blue, green, red, yellow.
Precious stones have sometimes been found--garnets, topaz, quartz,
tourmaline, lapis lazuli. But most of the stone is dull black or brown or
gray.
All this heavy matter drops close to the mountain. And on calm days
the ashes, also, fall near at home. Indeed, the volcano has built up its
own mountain. But a heavy wind often carries the fine dust for
hundreds of miles. Once it was blown as far as Constantinople and it
darkened the sun and frightened people there. Some of the ashes fall
into the sea. For years the currents carry them about from shore to
shore. At last they settle to the bottom and make clay or sand or mud.
The material lies there for thousands of years and is hard packed into a
soft fine grained rock, called tufa. The city of Naples to-day is built of
such stone that once lay under the sea. An earthquake long ago lifted
the ocean bottom and turned it into dry land. Now men live upon it and
cut streets in it and grow crops on it.
So for many miles about, Vesuvius has been making earth. Her ashes
lie hundreds of feet deep. Men dig wells and still find only material that
has been thrown out of the volcano. When this matter grows old and
lies under the sun and rain it turns to good soil. The acids of water and
air and plants eat into it. Rain wears it away. Plant roots crack the rocks
open. The top layer becomes powdered and rotted and mixed with
vegetable loam and is fertile soil. So the country all around the volcano
is a rich garden. Tomatoes, melons, grapes, olives, figs, cover the land.
But Vesuvius alone has not made all this ground. She is in a nest of
volcanoes. They have all been at work like her, spouting ashes and
pumice and rocks and lava. Ten miles away is a wide stretch of country
where there are more than a dozen old craters. Twenty miles out in the
blue bay a volcano stands up out of the water. A hundred miles south is

a group of small volcanic islands. They have hot springs. One has a
volcano that spouts every five or six minutes. At night it is like a
lighthouse for sailors. One of these Islands is only two thousand years
old. The men of Pompeii saw it pushed up out of the sea during an
earthquake. A little farther south is Mt. Aetna in Sicily. It is a greater
mountain than Vesuvius and has done more work than she has done. So
all the southern part of Italy seems to be the home of volcanoes and
earthquakes.
There are many other such places scattered over the world--Iceland,
Mexico, South America, Japan, the Sandwich Islands. Here the same
terrible play is going on--thunder, clouds, falling ashes, scalding rain,
flowing lava. The earth is being turned inside out, and men are learning
what she is made of.
[ILLUSTRATION: _Bronze lampholder_: Five lamps hung from the
branches of this bronze tree. It was twenty inches high.]

POMPEII TO-DAY
Years came and went and changed the world. The old gods died, and
the new religion of Christ grew strong. The old temples fell into ruins,
and new churches were built in their places. Instead of the old Roman
in his white toga came merchants in crimson velvet and knights in steel
armor and gentlemen in ruffles and modern men in plain clothes.
Among all these changes, Pompeii was almost forgotten. But after a
long while people began to be much interested in ancient Italy. They
read old Roman books, and learned of her wonderful cities. They began
to dig here and there and find beautiful statues and vases and jewels.
They read the story of Pompeii in an old Roman book--a whole city
suddenly buried just as her people had left her!
"There we should find treasures!" they said. "We should see houses,
temples, shops, streets, as they were seventeen hundred years ago. We
should find them full of statues and rich things. Perhaps we should find
some of the people who lived in ancient days. But where to dig?"
Their question was answered by accident. At that time certain men
were making a tunnel to carry spring water from the hills across the
country to a little town near Naples. The tunnel happened to pass over
buried Pompeii. They dug up some blocks of stone with Latin
inscriptions carved on them. After that other people